Reducing Administrative Workload for Medical Practices: Our Investment in Aaron.ai 

We are happy to extend the €3.7M Series-A funding round in Aaron.ai by Bonventure, IBB Ventures, and Futury Capital. Aaron.ai (“Aaron”) is on a mission to reduce the administrative workload for general practices (GPs), hospitals, and health clinics. Aaron was founded by Tobias Wagenführer (CEO), Richard von Schaewen (CSO) and Iwan Lappo-Danilewski (CTO) in 2015. The company employs over 50 employees from its office in Berlin, Germany.

What & Why

A substantial part of Western Europe is confronted with increasing pressure on the healthcare sector. This is driven by several factors, such as an aging population, low retention rates from healthcare professionals, and a wave of retiring doctors. Healthcare professionals face the consequences of these trends daily, where the same amount of work has to be done through fewer hands. In an industry where most of the traffic is channelized through phone calls, this is a major challenge. Hence, there is an emerging need from healthcare offices to increase efficiency by adopting new technologies.

Aaron delivers AI-based yet human-centered technology to healthcare professionals and their assistances, relieving them from several administrative tasks. Aaron’s AI-powered assistant can answer phone calls from clients 24/7 and can handle ~80% of daily routine questions such as prescriptions, sick notes, and appointment scheduling automatically. By structuring and prioritizing the remaining unhandled calls for practitioners in a task board, Aaron reduces the administrative workload for healthcare professionals while increasing the patient experience. Currently, over 3,000 professionals make use of Aaron’s technology ranging from bigger clients such as the German Federal Ministry of Health to chains or smaller individual gynaecological,cardiological, or dental practices.

The challenges of the healthcare industry are driven by an HR scarcity problem, andis resembled by underlying data about the German market:

• 70% of the doctors face challenges in fulfilling their open vacancies, and 30% is as a result of this unable to delegate tasks [1].

• More than 77% of the patient calls to practitioners are missed, of which 440,000 per year are emergency calls in Germany.

• 50% of the current German general practitioners are retired by 2035 [2].

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Investment Thesis

Healthcare professionals require additional hands in the form of efficiency gains by technology to overcome their challenges. Aaron finds itself in an excellent spot to provide efficiency gains in the healthcare sector. Our investment thesis revolves around:

• Value Proposition: With having more than 2,000 practitioners as a client, handling over 70 patient interactions per practice per day, and significantly reducing calling times with patients, the value offered to healthcare professionals is abundant. On the opposite side, patients will spend substantially less time call queuing so will face a better experience.

• Product Vision: The company has a self-service focus with a high virality factor, which makes it accessible to many doctors and provides significant product & market expansion opportunities. The vision is not to replace a doctor, but to assist a doctor to provide better care and to maintain the quality standards of the communication between doctor and patient.

• Trends and Opportunities: Aaron benefits from several significant tailwinds:

1. The HR challenges in the healthcare sector, are driven by low retention rates and a big wave of retirements among healthcare professionals.

2. An aging population where the need for healthcare will only increase over time.

3. The emergence of several HealthTech players such asKry, Doctolib, and Docplanner have paved the way for doctors to adopt new technologies.

4. Rising healthcare spend per capita.

5. The German government has implemented a total ofseven bills between 2019 and 2021 to stimulate e-health.

• Market Positioning: Aaron has a strong tailored solution to the healthcare sector. By integrating deep into healthcare systems the company has positioned itself to become the market leader in this large niche.

• Team: Tobias, Richard, and Iwan have a compelling view of the industry developments, and how to capitalize on them. By having an experimental but data-driven and     frugal mindset, the founders have found a great way of growing in a conservative market.

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Congratulations to the Aaron.ai team! We're looking forward to being part of your journey in digitizing healthcare administration.

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More information about Aaron can be found on their website: https://aaron.ai/.

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